Rael Dornfest and Tim O’Reilly welcomed the sold-out crowd here at ETech in their Monday evening keynotes. Rael reviewed the themes of previous ETech conferences and set the stage for this week’s focus on the Attention Economy, and Tim explained why he watches the early adopters who are pushing the envelope in an updated version of his “The O’Reilly Radar” talk.
Rael Dornfest is the program chair for ETech and the CTO of O’Reilly Media. Clearly pleased by the sold out packed house, Dornfest provded some history and background about the conference. “It’s our radar conference,” he explained, where O’Reilly can sniff out new ideas, watch the alpha geeks, and amplify the weak signals that we see emerging.
ETech started life as the Peer-To-Peer Conference back in February 2001, examining the changes that were occuring with the advent of p2p software. By the next conference Web services were showing up on the O’Reilly radar in a big way, and the conference name changed to the O’Reilly Peer-To-Peer and Web Services Conference to reflect that. (What a mouthful!) By the next show, the final name change to Emerging Technology took place, and besides Web services, wireless technology and becoming “untethered” became a major theme. Later conferences featured a Digital Democracy Teach-In and a focus on remixing.
Dornfest noted that the hallway sessions have always been a crucial part of ETech, and it’s great to see what’s emerged from the conversations of prior years. Dornfest also pointed out that some of our favorite companies were launched at previous ETechs, including flickr and del.icio.us, and he teased that there would be some interesting announcements this year too, but that’s all he could say for now.
This year’s theme is the Attention Economy. Dornfest noted that there is an abundance of available data now, “the data web is incredible” and effectively dealing with it is becoming increasingly important. We’ve also got information overload in our personal applications and Dornfest showed a screen montage of the varioius inboxes and newsfeeds and calendars and buddy lists and to-do lists on stickies that lived on his desktop, and I think most of us in the audience could relate. I know I felt my stress level rising. Then he switched to a blank blue screen, and we collectively sighed a breath of relief.
“Attenuation is the next aggregator,” predicted Dornfest. “I think there are some great businesses to be built on giving you less.”
O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly then took the stage to give an updated version of his O’Reilly Radar talk, which he noted could also be called “Watching the Alpha Geeks.” By watching the early adopters who are pushing the envelope O’Reilly is able to work towards the his company’s mission of changing the world by spreading the words of innovators.
O’Reilly described the filters he applies to new technologies:
- technology is on track with a long term trend
- technology is disruptive
- uptake is accelerating
- technology has grassroots support, it’s bottom-up
- inspires passion
- has deeper social implications
- better information about this technology will make a difference
O’Reilly spoke about the power of harnessing collective intelligence and how the companies that have figured out how to get users to add their own data to the mix are coming out ahead.
Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk as one example, the “man in the machine” of the latest generation of powerful applications was a theme O’Reilly kept returning to. “If you’re a user of flickr, you’re a component of flickr.”
O’Reilly also thinks we’re starting to build applications that interact with users in more sophisticated ways. Think about the tag cloud technique that has become popular recently, he points out. It’s really a major user interface navigation element that is completely created by users, says O’Reilly, “It’s taking user empowerment to the next level.”
O’Reilly also pointed to Craig’s List as an application that has been almost totally turned over to the users, and is wildly successful. This point was hit home with a graphic that showed the top web sites and their respeictive number of employees — Craig’s List is right up there in traffic, but has only 18 employees, compared to thousands on all the other sites.
For a dramatic example of how we’re moving towards a world in which devices and applications are going to be merged in new and exciting ways, a representative from Zimbra came up and demo’ed a new feature of their messaging software that allowed developers to easily create new apps that tied disparate systems together. In the demo when a phone number was clicked on in an email message, a phone call was triggered via Asterisk from the reciepients phone to the number. Other scenarios for triggering phone calls, including starting a conference call by just selecting a calendar meeting entry were also demonstrated.
O’Reilly also talked about his interest in hacking in the real world. Showing off the Instructables web site and suggesting that someone tackle the problem of creating version control systems for hardware design, he celebrates the DIY mindset that they are tapping into with efforts like Make magazine, and told us about the upcoming Maker Faire. The Maker Faire is being held on April 22-23 in San Mateo, California, and sounds like an extreme science fair that would be good fun for the whole family.
Dornfest and O’Reilly set the stage nicely for what promises to be a fascinating conference.
